Grants talk:Programs/Wikimedia Community Fund/Wikimedia Belgium Yearly grant 2023

Feedback from the Northern and Western Europe (NWE) Regional Funding Committee on your proposal

Hello Geertivp, LabDom, Sam.Donvil and Taketa

Thank you for taking the time to submit your General Support Fund proposal in the Northern and Western Europe region. We are pleased to have reviewed your application and have the following comments and questions:

• Your proposal is clear and straightforward. We want to call out, especially, the thorough job you did on your risk assessment. We appreciate your focus on Practical and realistic needs: projects, communities, growth.
• We are glad to see your focus on growth and on development and diversification of your board. We note that your board is small and that some want to step down. How do you plan to develop your board in the coming year? What strategies do you have in mind to recruit and retain women on the board? Or younger board members?
• We would like to ask you to provide more detail on how you will engage new volunteers. What strategies do you have in mind to recruit volunteers more generally, especially with regard to diversification of volunteers? What are your strategies for retention?
• What kind of help do you need with development in areas like organisational sustainability? Or cultivating a more diverse volunteer base?
• It appears that none of the metrics are filled in. Could you provide us with your Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning plan? What are your learning goals for the coming year? How do you plan to go about this learning? What do you expect to use as metrics? We encourage you to review this new guidance, Quick tips for applicants to include Learning, Evaluation and Sharing efforts in proposals, as a support to developing your Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning plan.
• We note that you are working in three languages and that you are a minority community within the larger body of language speakers in each of those languages. How do you coordinate with other affiliates working in these languages? How do you (or could you) position yourself to focus on your unique areas of strength within each language you work in?
• You have provided a list of collaborations. It would be helpful if you could provide a little more detail about those collaborations.

Thank you and we look forward to hearing from you.

On behalf of the NWE Regional Committee,

–Marti (WMF) (talk) 22:06, 14 November 2022 (UTC)

WMBE Board feedback on the initial committee evaluation of WMBE Grant 2023

The WMBE Board provides here an answers to the above question.

• Original version of the WMBE grant 2023

In general the grant committee feedback about the WMBE 2023 grant request was positive, but the grant committee would like to have more details about activities, partners and metrics. This is the feedback from the WMBE Board to the North-West Europe grant evaluation committee (November 2022).

Additional documents:

• Event Metrics proposal 2023.xlsx; added to the initial request, based upon activities in 2022, ongoing projects and prospects for 2023
• Activities and partners.xlsx]; we have added a description of collaborating organisations, partners, and activities

For reference: existing documents: (unmodified)

• Risk assessment.xlsx
• WMBE budget 2023.xlsx

About Staff and Freelance

Till today Wikimedia Belgium never had permanent staff, nor freelance.

For the grant 2022, we had the plan to recruit one (part time) freelance person, but we failed in assigning this function, due to the many volunteer activities that were taking place, and the limited number of volunteers, as we explained earlier.

For the grant 2023, we decided to keep the same idea to offload some of the volunteer work that could be executed by a part time freelance person. We documented earlier that we have too few volunteers, and that some of the administrative or technical work could be better performed by a freelance person.

To give an idea: we have proposed a budget item of 10.000 €. If we assume an hourly rate of 35 €/h, we would arrive at 6 hours per week as an average over 12 months. If we assume less activities during summertime, we could assign a freelance for 1 day (8 hours) per week.

The advantage of having a freelance instead of permanent staff is that in Belgium the social security laws are very strict and expensive (including also taxes). Assigning a freelance is easier and more flexible, as it is only based on a business contract and an invoice.

Having permanent staff also involves having an office, additional insurances, more bureaucracy, administration, and people management responsibilities.

For freelance activities we are thinking about:

• Providing some special and dedicated technical training about e.g. OpenRefine, Wikibase, Pywikibot, PAWS, Toolforge
• Better collaborate with institutions (meemoo, musea, archives)
• Especially for being able to do more technical projects together with institutions (museums, heritage, archives)
• We want to make a video about “Good photo taking techniques for Wiki Loves Heritage”. Therefore we would like to have a script editor, a camera operator, a video editor, and a photography expert that is interviewed. Possibly we would like to have subtitles (Belgium is a tri-lingual country NL/FR/DE, and a lot of English is used as well).
• Translating project and communication related documents (including web pages)
• Give (technical) support in organising activities and follow-up

Freelance work should be different from typical volunteer work. It should be more operational. Paid work should not overlap with volunteer work, to not demotivate or be in conflict with volunteers. Board members are also volunteers, and are not paid.

We believe project related work should be delivered by either the chapter board (contacting institutions and planning programs), or by volunteers (project managers, sessions). Project managers should preferably be volunteers, unless there is a professional aspect.

How to recruit new Board members?

• Ask people at writing sessions; participants, and those who co-organise the session
  • Problem is here that young people, especially women, have a lot of private activities (studying, academic work, new house, home, children, career)
    • This is especially true for 2 of the current board members, that would like to be replaced in 2023
• From co-creation activities with museums, archives, and libraries
• Offering training for specific tasks (budgeting, ledger, financial reporting, legislation, managerial skills)

How to recruit more volunteers?

• Show the results of our work: newsletters, project pages, Programs and Events Dashboard (Outreach)
• Show that our work is joyful, interesting, and delivers results
• Show that our collaboration with GLAM is successful

Obtain more diversity in volunteers

• Women
• Young people
• French speaking; French speaking volunteers are more oriented towards Wikimedia France

How to attract young people?

• Co-creation activities with museums, archives, and libraries
• Schools: young teachers
• Universities: assistants, PhD
• Adult education

How to retain more volunteers?

• Let them participate with joyful activities
• Learn them how to work with Wikimedia platforms
• Repeated activities
• Attract retired people (and this is the case in other Chapters; see statistics presented on the WikiconNL 19 November 2022)

How to recruit new Project leaders?

• People should know how Wikipedia works
• Deliver specific and decent documentation
• Provide training:
  • Give presentations
  • Do more with Wikidata and SDC
  • Actively contribute to MetaWiki, Pywikibot, PAWS, Toolforge, Phabricator, Wikitech, Quarry, Gerrit

How to attract more women?

• Be less technical
• Have more “women” subjects
  • More art?

How to augment organisational sustainability?

• Attract more volunteers
• Have good projects with decent partners
  • Partners small and big, if possible
  • Examples attract other institutions
• Have our administration in order
• Ensure better communication
  • Proper e-mail distribution lists: on need to know basis
  • Frequent newsletter
  • Newspapers
    • Invite journalists to write about specific activities
  • Radio and television broadcasts
• Give presentations
• Learning

Learning goals for the coming year

• Board training
• Training for project leaders and managers
• Training for Wikipedians
• Financial assistance of volunteers that want to attend an (international) conference

Metrics

Use EOY statistics as a preparation/forecast for the next grant

How do we perform project management, monitor and build metrics: Let’s Connect presentation.

We use the Programs and Events tool; we run Campaign statistics. This is a convenient way to gather statistics for all of the programs (title) and events (term).

We can provide a list of projects and activities that we foresee for 2023, but it is difficult to preview the outcome and statistics. For some activities we have only a “Letter of intent”, or a one-time meeting in 2022 where the partner organisation expressed their wish or intrest to have one or more writing sessions or activities in 2023 with WMBE.

We can then use the activity report and statistics of 2022 to prepare an estimation for the metrics for 2023. See “Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning plan” for further inspiration.

How to collaborate more with other language organisations and other chapters?

• Kennisplatform WMNL: document how to edit Wikipedia

Geert Van Pamel (WMBE) (talk) 19:38, 30 November 2022 (UTC)

Round 1 2023 decision

Congratulations! The Northern and Western Europe Regional Funds Committee has recommended your proposal for funding!

The Wikimedia Foundation has approved the committee's recommendation to fund your proposal in full for 40,000 EUR

Comments regarding this decision:
The NWE Regional Funds Committee recommends these priorities as part of WM Belgium's work this year:

• Capacity building related to cultivating leadership (board development, staff recruitment and training, volunteer organizer development)
• Developing a vision that explains the unique place of WMBE within your context. If you see it as relevant, you might consider making time for learning conversations with other affiliates with similarities in their contexts (such as, for example, affiliates working in countries with similar conditions around supporting multiple language communities)
• Implementing a strategic plan that provides organizational development priorities and structural thinking around project implementation

Next steps:

1. You will be contacted to sign a grant agreement.
2. If you have questions, you can contact the Regional Program Officer for the Northern and Western Europe Region.

Posted on behalf of the Northern and Western Europe (NWE) Funding Committee, –Marti (WMF) (talk) 08:39, 5 January 2023 (UTC)